Tag: lyric narrative
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The Book
wrote The Book after finding my mother’s old paperback on my nightstand—a relic of her insistence that language could save us from silence. The poem began as a study of inheritance: how reading becomes a form of haunting. Each line traces the movement of a child carrying a book through rooms, echoing a mother’s voice…
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The Transparent Mother
The Transparent Mother began as a refusal to sentimentalize disappearance. I wanted to write a poem where the mother’s vanishing wasn’t metaphor but physical fact—bare feet, bloody toes, a face turned away. The poem inherits her instability without naming it.
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The Road They Will Leave By
The Road They Will Leave By” began as a meditation on exclusion and memory. I wanted to write a poem that refused sentimentality and simile, one that relied on physical detail and emotional pressure to convey the quiet violence of being remembered wrongly—or not at all. The soldier’s camouflage, the elders’ breath, the locking of…
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Before My Memory Began
Before My Memory Began” comes from the earliest story I was ever told about myself—a moment I cannot remember but have carried as if I lived it. The poem moves between a beach scene and a hospital room, two images that have followed me for years. I wrote it to examine how memory is inherited,…
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Bone Confession
Bone Confession began as a way to name the physical weight I carry from the people I’ve lost and the ones I couldn’t help. The poem grew from a single pulse in the wrist into a record of how the body stores memory—through objects, breath, and the small actions that prove we’re still here. I…
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A Proper Fold
A Proper Fold emerged from my ongoing exploration of ritual as both inheritance and resistance. I wanted to write a poem that honored the quiet violence of conformity—how grief, gender, and legacy get folded into gesture. The speaker is a 4-F child shaped by military precision and familial duty, yet excluded from the honors that…
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A Peach Seed Thrown Away
A Peach Seed Thrown AwayIt was late spring—the kind of daythat wears winter’s breath.I was seventeen,waiting for the 6:42 a.m. trainto take meto my college interview.I wasn’t sureI wanted to go.The station was mostly empty—just the usual commuters,coffee cups steaming—small altars of routine.He stood near the vending machine,maybe a few years older,maybe not.He wore a…